Note: Anaglyphic stereo requires red-blue 3D glasses to view. *** "The Home of the Blizzard: The 1911-14 Australasian Antarctic Expedition More

Note: Anaglyphic stereo requires red-blue 3D glasses to view. *** "The Home of the Blizzard: The 1911-14 Australasian Antarctic Expedition Stereoscopic Photographic Record" is a stereoscopic ("3D") movie made from stereoscopic glass-plate images taken by Frank Hurley during the 1911-14 AAE. Several dozen survive - here you see 10 of them in a short web version. This is a project that evolved over many years and here you only see a brief part of it in anaglyphic (red-blue) stereo. In many respects it is still a work in progress as it moves towards high-definition 16:9 DVD release in the near future. This movie generally shows on passive or active polarised stereoscopic VR systems using very high data-rate video and good projectors or monitors. On DVD it will still give a good experience. Unfortunately, anaglyphic stereo provides poor extinction across eyes, so you will see ghosting - amplified here by web video compression - it's unavoidable due to current web-video compression technologies. To minimise this view the video at a small size - not fullscreen. On Vimeo you should be able to switch to fullscreen mode but watch the video unscaled - this will blank out your monitor(s) and provide a decent viewing experience. If you can live with that, it still gives an extraordinary insight into one of the pioneering Antarctic expeditions of a century ago. This 4:3 version was facilitated by the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (for their "Islands to Ice" permanent Antarctic exhibition) and the Mawson Collection (SA Museum), and has been seen by well over half a million visitors since it first screened in early 2006. The glass plates themselves are tiny objects: incredibly fragile sheets of glass about 20cm x 30cm and maybe 3mm thick. It's extraordinary that they survive. They exhibit fantastic detail that has never been seen before - until I created this movie - having scanned them at very high resolution. It is possible to read the titles of the books the expeditioners were reading - a type of forensic digital archaeology. Stereoscopic viewing imparts a sense of immediacy and presence to these venerable images - think of all the vicissitudes of time and travel they have survived. There's something truly modern about them and the lives of the young men you see in them, doing something extraordinary. They were mostly in their 20's : many of them went off to their doom in the First World War. Restoration of the images was extremely difficult, due to image damage and the issues of binocular rivalry this introduced. In itself this took me many months to resolve. The software driving the "camera" movement, compensating for parallax differentiation and a series of other technical issues, was developed by Paul Bourke (WASP, UWA) From a film-makers perspective, I am inspired by the documentary approaches by Michael Grigsby (e.g. especially Enginemen (1959)), John Grierson and Errol Morris - exemplary documentary film-makers, albeit with a huge difference in style. But nevertheless, the sense of veracity and enquiry - that's why there is no interpretive commentary here. I think the stereoscopic nature of images breathes so much into them that would only be "flattened" by the authoritative monologue - it is so seldom (if ever) that we see images of this time, this place, in this way - that surely it is enough to witness and visually explore - to absorb. Interpretation can come later. I composed and recorded the music on a tiny keyboard and laptop using GarageBand (apple mac) aboard the 10,000 ton Russian Icebreaker "Vasiliy Golovnin" in 2005-6, whilst travelling to Antarctica on an Antarctic Arts Fellowship. Maybe it's the first ever film soundtrack composed and performed in Antarctica? Whatever - it was a moment of inspiration and I'm proud of it. It captures that magnificent sense of yearning, isolation and grandeur that I witnessed on the wild southern ocean - a romantic sensibility of space and ice. It's called "Southern Ocean" - hopefully, that's pretty straight-up. My sincere thanks to the many people involved in making this possible - especially Paul Bourke (WASP) for endless patience, Trevor Hilton (Sound Design) and Adrian Spinks (then of TMAG, now MONA) and Mark Pharaoh and Clive Wilson-Roberts (Mawson Collection) for believing in it. petermorse.com.au mawsons-huts.org.au mawsonshuts.aq
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Village Voice: Froth Typing* By William Bowers Yuck, I know—skimming an earnest vouch for a Pere-Ubu-hiatus placeholding project More

Village Voice: Froth Typing* By William Bowers Yuck, I know—skimming an earnest vouch for a Pere-Ubu-hiatus placeholding project risks briefly unsexying yr best summer ever, but please indulge my froth-typing about an awesome track that should be a dance-night staple in every straw village where the anxious scene kids staff restaurants for the self-possessed college kids' bankcards. Warning, spoiler ahead: the awesome song is called "From The Life Of King John," and it can be found on last summer's re-release of Home and Garden's 1984 album History and Geography, via Exit Stencil Recordings—that's a pun on "existential," and if you didn't get it, that's because WE ARE ALL ALONE AND MEANINGLESS. (Exit Stencil's name is fitting; recall that the playwright David Ives described the metaphysical tenor of the label's home base, Cleveland, as "like death, without the advantages.") Obscure reissues almost always queer my hustle—the vinty-freshness of a text both "new" and "classic" is irresistible bait to aspirant hear-it-alls, and History and Geography stands as my fave weird-white-male resurfacing since Drag City went public in 1994 with Corky's Debt To His Father, by relevant-to-the-remainder-of-this-sentence Mayo Thompson; see, that ubiquitous ambassador of free-form pomp played in one incarnation of Pere Ubu alongside Home & Garden's future rhythm section, and his unkillable Red Krayola co-gigged H&G's reunion shows. (These guys reel mad connection-cred, as evidenced by the Mekons principals on stage at their coming-back-party.) Borrring, tho, because, for all their odd-to-plain-geeked affectations, H&G are ironically most singular for their circumspect soundalikeness; they generate epic echoes of the spazzy pop dropped by their legendary precursors and then-contemporaries. Jeff "my poetry is as sketchy as Jim" Morrison can sound uncannily like David Byrne and Bryan Ferry as he intones his unremarkable-to-silly verse with portentous, dorxcellent gusto. Shamelessly unsubtle solo-Eno swaths obtain throughout the album, whenever the band isn't mixing King Crimson with disco, or organ-damaged art-gospel with Silver Apples, or untrad jazz with, um, Pere Ubu (version X.0 of which H&G guitarist Jim Jones would graduate to in the late eighties). The liner notes admit—and even an uninvolved listen testifies—that this band revels in the ecstasy of influence. Holy shitwhistle, "From The Life Of King John": it's got cheapo-chic drum machine whose retro-enuff moment has come, sweet for the CYHSY apologists. It's got Morrison's most assured vocals and most chorus-esque chorus—even though he's yelling "I am the king of Ireland," you can get your Joe Lieberman on and hear/scream "Iran"! It's got guitars and keyboards that eerily and perfectly bump early Joy Division into those "Ceremony" blokes doomed to become New Order. It's got a wtf funk breakdown worthy of Liquid Liquid that bursts into rawk again as if tracing a timeline from soul music's bullseye to post-punk's catchall spittoon; like, you'll picture Fab 5 Freddy playing the dozens with, I don't know, Dee Dee Ramone's dealer in a deleted scene from Downtown 81. "From The Life Of King John" holds its own indie-genitals with any of this semester's bandwidth sensations. It simply must be heard. I'm not even telling you about the rest of the album, really, about the biomechanical hydraulics of "Birthday," or the synthesized bagpipes of "Prairie Sailors." What I will do is warn quaint ol' militant feminists and postcolonial theorists—bless your hearts—about Morrison's irksome-in-megadoses lyrical fixation with masculinity, patriarchy, royalty, etc. But seriously, you might not even care, on account of how these jams jam. For example, I am totally against animal cruelty, and I think graffiti tagging is a sad mimicry of corporate branding, but the grimly propulsive "From The Life Of King John" makes me want to carve my name into my neighbor's dog.
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